At this year’s AOC convention, Empower RF Systems will talk about Pulse Shaping in Amplifiers. The electromagnetic environment is changing at an increasing pace, and thus the importance of electronic warfare (EW) system adaptability, flexibility, and innovation has also increased. However the RF high power system amplifier has not really evolved in any significant way since the inclusion of the microcontroller twenty years ago. That’s a remarkable statement given the advancements seen in virtually every other application of electronic products and systems. Not only are innovative technologies needed, the EW systems engineer will benefit greatly from the new capabilities that a software defined, re-configurable, smart high power amplifier can provide.
One such capability is the breakthrough for pulse shaping where the HPA reproduces the pulse with extreme high fidelity and by doing so removes that task from the system integrator. Additional benefits include simplifying external hardware, lowering overall cost and improving SWaP.
They will conduct remote live demonstrations of its broadband, high power 1KW, 1 to 3 GHz amplifier. Real world examples and data will be shown at the convention, from an amplifier simulating pulsed jamming scenarios to illustrate the performance problems and their sources within the HPA and why future amplifier performance issues will be resolved within the amplifier using real time digital correction.
Pulse shaping, as it is done today, is an effort to fix fidelity issues caused by the transmitting amplifier and is accomplished by a combination of imperfect methods, most external to the amplifier. In this technical session, Paulo Correa, Empower RF’s CTO, will describe a new high power amplifier architecture with built in real time feedback that is capable of matching the input signal shape, minimizing droop, overshoot, ringing, rise and fall times.
The workshop will also illustrate the key benefits of the amplifier:
- Real time optimization of the PA pulse characteristics
- Reduce system engineering design time
- Reduce overall size and weight of the jamming system
- Reduced hardware to correct droop
- Adaptive digital correction of the pulse in the event of variable VSWR
The amplifier will be located at the headquarters in Los Angeles and viewed in the AOC exhibit venue with live streaming video while remotely controlling the amplifier from the exhibit floor through a standard web browser.
